Ongoing U.S Police Brutality and Corruption Discussion Thread

It gets more fucked: https://www.tmz.com/2020/08/10/la-county-sheriffs-point-guns-santa-clarita-black-teens-needing-help/

Not shockingly, multiple 911 calls were made. Three in total. Two of them state the homeless man attempted to rob them and they were fending him off. Another says that the Black men are attacking a homeless man.

Guess which one became the description dispatch gave to the officers? Fuckin' bullshit.

For that third caller, they may have not seen how the fight began, or they may have been racist. Impossible to know.

But this Get Out of Jail Free card that is "The caller and dispatcher gave us wrong details, we are under no obligation to suss out what's actually going on at the scene before drawing guns" is precisely why SWATTing works.

LASD is the most harmful police force in the united states.

LAPD is like the ur-corrupt police of the modern era.

i don't disagree but LAPD is a different entity and actually slightly better than LASD (which is the agency in this story). LASD is off the charts.

Another says that the Black men are attacking a homeless man.

Guess which one became the description dispatch gave to the officers? Fuckin' bullshit.

even if this were the case, when the rolled up and saw teens with skateboards the obvious coarse of action is to pull out your AR-15's ? just fucking assholes the lot of them

LA sherrif's department provides policing for cities in LA county that don't have their own police force, and unincorporated LA county, and they run county lockups. the chief of LASD (i.e. the sherrif) is a elected (unlike the chief of LAPD). he is also a lunatic who displays open contempt for/insubordination to democratic local government. LASD is riddled with gangs (especially east LA and compton) and a significant fraction of it's 2000s-era senior leadership is in prison right now. LAPD is very bad, but LASD is just intitutionally insane and completely iredeemable, but no one cares because they don't police white LA.

Is this the all purpose rioting and looting thread, too? Because from what I was reading this morning some fucked up shit went down in Chicago last night.

I'm still trying to wrap my head around what actually happened. There is so much contradictory information and bullshit flying around today. "teens organized this on TikTok" (which just reeks of scare-mongering urban legend, see: "the knockout game"), "pros planned this, see where they strategically placed U-hauls!". All of which is before you even get to whatever happened in Englewood yesterday, which seems to have been a flashpoint with multiple different versions of events.

From what I understand everybody is right, or at least a little right. There was supposedly a call to cops last night about somebody in Englewood with a gun. The cops show up, find who they identify as a suspect, chase after said 20 year old suspect, who supposedly shoots at them, and cops end up shooting him in the shoulder. Word gets around not that cops shot and wounded an armed 20-year-old, who is now in the hospital and recovering, but that they shot and killed an unarmed 15-year-old in the back. Tension builds as this inaccurate depiction makes the rounds, and more cops get sent to Englewood. Meanwhile, in retaliation, or simply to exploit the situation, troublemakers post on social media an invitation to caravan into downtown and go looting, which they do. So yes the looting and shooting are related, but only in the most tenuous of ways. At least as I understand it. I have a good friend who I trust who has been on the front line of all this stuff for the last few months, and his description is significantly different than the description I got from another good friend of mine who has been on the front line of this stuff for months.

That's actually the best summary I've found so far that actually touches on all of the various threads I've so far just seen in bits and pieces.

even if this were the case, when the rolled up and saw teens with skateboards the obvious coarse of action is to pull out your AR-15's ? just fucking assholes the lot of them

― (•̪●) (carne asada), Monday, August 10, 2020 2:25 PM bookmarkflaglink

oh completely. cops always pretend as if dispatches are never wrong and that it's not their job to assess what the scene actually is when they arrive. and when witnesses, including one of the people who called, are screaming at you that they didn't do anything, maybe don't continue to point the AKs at the kids for another 2 minutes. so a bystander doesn't have to scream PUT YOUR HANDS UP, out of fear that you're going to shoot them?

This story about Baltimore PD is bonkers:

https://www.salon.com/2020/08/10/the-incredible-saga-of-baltimores-worst-gang-an-elite-police-squad-gone-bad/

So much disgusting and murderous behavior.

https://www.thecity.nyc/2020/8/11/21364522/nypd-cops-tased-unarmed-queens-man-died-video-shows

Gut-wrenching. And of course, NYPD falsely claimed, in the immediate aftermath, that he engaged officers with a sword; bodycam footage reveals that in fact, they asked him through the door to ditch the sword, he did so, and the officers confirmed it was gone.

"NYPD officials didn’t respond to questions Tuesday about how the prior statement squares with the video, which doesn’t show Zapantis holding the sword at any point."

Dismantle the NYPD.

xpost I just picked up that "I Got A Monster" book from the library, looking forward to (and dreading) starting it.

Meanwhile, locally, a bunch of well-meaning protestors went down to Englewood and got more or less chased out by activists from the community, who complained that outside protestors lead to trouble, and it's the locals in the community who often end up paying the price, especially when protestors come down there to protest the police but don't show up to, say, protest rampant gang violence that kills kids.

Standing in the middle of 63rd Street, encircled by police reform protesters, the 42-year-old lifelong resident of Englewood yelled: “None of these motherf-----s are gonna be here tomorrow. That’s why I got a problem.”
“They didn’t let the community know. They didn’t put flyers on peoples’ doors,” Kidd said. “If they would’ve gotten something incited with the police, who’s gotta deal with it tomorrow? The community. Not them. They’ll be somewhere sipping sangria somewhere. I’m telling you like it is.”

More here:

https://blockclubchicago.org/2020/08/12/older-englewood-leaders-to-young-protesters-dont-disrupt-our-neighborhood-and-leave-us-with-pissed-off-police/

and here:
https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/breaking/ct-englewood-police-station-protest-20200812-w5k4bsqbkjft3gddiawr55jopq-story.html

not exactly sure where to put this grim article but it has an excellent historical summary of police functions and i think it's largely otm about where things are headed.

"In both the South and the North, the purpose of police departments was fundamentally the same: to secure, within the settled frontier, the social order on which profit-making activities depended."

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/climate-apartheid-is-the-coming-police-violence-crisis

https://www.thecity.nyc/2020/8/17/21371231/nypd-withholding-evidence-from-ccrb-police-abuse-investigations

HAPPENING NOW: Following a vote from #ATXCouncil members to cut millions from @Austin_Police, @GovAbbott has announced a legislative proposal that says any city that defunds police will have their property tax rate frozen at current levels and won't be able to raise it.

— Mark D. Wilson (@MDWilsonSA) August 18, 2020

Austin cut the police budget, so naturally Governor Abbott proposes legislation to freeze the property tax of any city that does that. Seems like a bold chess move from a guy who usually loses at checkers.

Remember a decade ago when people said Texas was becoming a purple or even blue state? That was funny

Texas is becoming purple, but disenfranchisement and gerrymandering have slowed that process down. Even I was surprised at how close the Beto/Cruz Senate results were in 2018. Senate races have been Republican blowouts here for as long as I can remember. The Gubernatorial races still are.

I'm good with the police budget cuts and having my property tax rates frozen.

Oh no Mr Governor, please don't throw me in the brier patch freeze my property tax rate

yeah how does that penalize communities

Really hard to figure out what his strategy here is.

Yeah, idgi. Whenever they raise property taxes here (all the time) they always do so apologetically and promise future relief/lower rates.

yeah how does that penalize communities

― Its big ball chunky time (Jimmy The Mod Awaits The Return Of His Beloved), Tuesday, August 18, 2020 11:31 AM (five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Imagine if you need to improve schools, for example?

guess they'll need to defund the police some more then

But also imagine that you've freed up a large portion of your budget but drastically cutting down the amount of money you are allocating to the police department and have money left over after reinvesting in the services you can now fund because you aren't giving so much money to the police department.

In Texas they can always turn to raising the sales tax to scrape up revenue off the backs of the poor.

Probably not going to happen, but ok

DJP gets it

Fwiw Texas has high property tax rates by US standards.

And they have gone up a massive amount in Austin during the 15 years that I've been a home owner.

let's be real though, unless it's a school full of rich White kids it wasn't getting updated anyway

from a friend, this struck me:

"The police are a 19th-century institution using mostly 20th-century technology and techniques to mishandle 21st-century problems."

I have no idea how much national play it's getting, but the stuff in Kenosha is nuts. Kenosha, for those not from around here/there, is this modest Wisconsin city (pop. 100k) just a little bit north of the Illinois border, about equidistant between Chicago and Milwaukee. I only ever go up there to shop for beer, go to the Cheese Castle/Brat Stop, or, once or twice, hit the nearby annual Renaissance Faire. It's also Paul Ryan's old district, so there's your silent majority for you. And last night it sounds like one of the silent majority's best shot three, killing two, with his long gun while protecting a gas station (?) because rumors spread online those villainous protestors were "throwing pipe bombs on innocent civilians." Of course no such thing was happening. As Sherriff Beth put it on the WaPo:

Beth, the sheriff, told the Journal Sentinel that armed militia members have been on the streets in recent nights, calling them a “vigilante group.” After the shooting, he told the Times that the bloodshed validated his concerns about armed civilians. “I’ve had people saying, ‘Why don’t you deputize citizens?’” he said. “This is why you don’t deputize citizens with guns to protect Kenosha.”

I used to work for a company that had their main office in Kenosha, so I spent a lot of time up there for work and on various construction projects. I don't want to paint the whole city as awful (there is a lot of great stuff there and obviously, from the protests, lots of people fighting the good fight) but the amount of casual racism I encountered up there was truly shocking. Like every time I was there, regularly between 2000 and 2010, I heard so much awful stuff. Because I was a cis white male, these morons always assumed I was in full agreement with their views and they'd drop the most vile shit so casually. Looking back, I wish I pushed back more on it, but I was in my first job out of college and so often this was coming from my firm's clients, or contractors that had hired my firm, so I just had no skills to push back and I often felt I couldn't without facing repercussions professionally. Not that it excuses my lack of action, it still troubles me. All of this is to say, I felt an extra layer of queasy when this all happened because I've seen firsthand just how insidious and prevalent the racism is in that city.

I heard a story on WBEZ (npr) about how his Jacob Blake's grandfather was the pastor at Ebenezer AME church in Evanston. Also that his family was involved in the civil rights movement in Evanston. What happened to him is so wrong, and I am seeing a lot of social media posts revolving around the idea that a person doesn't need to be a perfect citizen in order to not get shot in the back by the police for "resisting".

Yeah, his grandfather has quite a legacy in Evanston, there were a lot of social media stories about him around here even before that connection started being reported on.

The last time I was up there, a few weeks back, my daughter was totally uneasy, saying, unprompted, "all of these people look like Trump supporters."

Posted by my journalist friend:

Spent 14 hours in Kenosha yesterday. Was teargassed twice. Followed along with looters. Watched probably 12 streetlights crash to the ground. Talked with a militia in camo carrying AR-15s who were hired to protect a gas station. Spoke with an older couple spitting mad the police violence made it their city and said we were in a civil war. Saw people crying over homes and stores burnt to the ground. Saw police do nothing except fire teargas and beanbag bullets at kids. Watched a woman crying in the middle of her street shaming people taking video of her building being burned. Talked to an 84-year-old woman who described seeing Jacob Blake's body on the pavement just steps from her garden. Talked with another woman who lost her job at a Mexican grocery because it was burning across the street. Consoled a couple who helped a 70-year-old store owner after he was beaten trying to save his store. Met a biker who said he remembered his hometown as a peaceful place. Experienced the ghostly silence of dozens of people sitting in the street, leaning against trees, in cars or standing with their dogs on the sidewalk watching everything burn at 1:30 in the morning. Talked with angry people on every part of the spectrum there can possibly be a side on.
The world is in a much more despondent place than most people realize. The GOP is wrong, the darkness they predict with the boogie-man Democrat is already here. And the poor, they always, always lose.

yo wtf is going on

I’ve had people saying, ‘Why don’t you deputize citizens?’” he said. “This is why you don’t deputize citizens with guns to protect Kenosha.”

the police were literally coordinating with the militia, but okay

Some years back I got in the habit of picking up random wtf Playmobil sets. Cleaning up around the house today I found this truly wtf gem:

https://i.imgur.com/DrU68VW.jpg

Ages 4+!

Weird, I wonder why it cut off? Anyway, it's a cop cuffed to an ... antifa-esque anarchist I guess?

Is this from the Frankie Goes To Hollywood playset?

It's a mock-up from when the Lego Movie guys pitched for the Republican National Convention production gig

This kid was 17! Jesus.

whats happening in Kenosha is awful. since this is my state I'm seeing a lot of predictably bad opinions on Facebook, I hate that shit is getting destroyed but man Wisconsin was due for a reckoning at some point. if you go to the predominantly black neighborhoods in Milwaukee you can see how run down everything is, the roads are crumbling, the schools are underfunded and overattended, every time I went to visit a buddy there I'd see the same pieces of broken glass in the street. and yet you can't go more than 2 blocks without seeing a cop car, almost everyone there seems to have a story about getting harassed. I guess a lot of big cities have those areas but Milwaukee is particularly bad

Not only was the shooter 17, but he crossed state lines with an illegally owned (or stolen? unclear) assault rifle and was coordinating with the police the entire time.

This is Kyle Rittenhouse, 17, an Illinois resident who was just charged with first-degree murder of two people last night in Kenosha, Wisconsin. This teen, whose social media history is full of misogyny and white supremacy, had easy access to an AR-15.
pic.twitter.com/OsfXzSHy5M

— Shannon Watts (@shannonrwatts) August 26, 2020